Chapter 45 · Working With Others
Comments and Threaded Replies
A comment is a note pinned to a passage. It does not change a word of the draft, which is the point: it is how you leave a question for a collaborator, or for yourself in three weeks, without touching the text you are asking about. Threads, replies and resolution all live in one tab beside the page.
Leaving a comment
Select the words you want to talk about, open the Review tab in the ribbon, and press New Comment. It is the first button in the tab, next to the Suggest checkbox covered in Chapter 44.
Selecting first is required. Pressing the button with the cursor sitting in one place and nothing selected gets you "Select some text to comment on." and no dialog.
The dialog is headed Comment and shows the passage you selected in quotation marks, trimmed to the first 120 characters. Type your note in the box marked Your note… and press Comment to save it, or Cancel to back out. An empty note does nothing, so cancelling and saving nothing amount to the same thing.
Saving does three things at once: it tints the selected passage and underlines it in blue, it files the thread in the rail, and it switches the rail to the Comments tab so you can see what you just wrote.
There is no keyboard shortcut for it. Chapter 10 has the keys that do exist.
If the save fails, for example because your connection dropped, Storskarvia takes the highlight back off the page and leaves the dialog open with your note still in it, along with a message saying why. A highlighted passage pointing at a comment that was never stored is worse than no highlight, so the mark and the thread live or die together.
The Comments rail
The right-hand rail carries five tabs: Facts, Continuity, Comments, Story Bible and Changes. The number beside the Comments tab counts open threads. Replies do not add to it, and resolved threads drop out of it, so the number is the size of the pile still waiting for you.
With nothing filed yet, the tab reads "No comments yet. Select text and hit 💬." The button it means is New Comment on the Review tab.
Each thread shows the quoted passage, who wrote it, the date, and the note. Your display name is
taken from your account; without one, Storskarvia uses the part of your email address before the
@.
If the rail says "Comments could not be loaded. Reload the page to try again.", reload the page. The list is fetched once when the editor opens, and a failed fetch leaves the tab with nothing to act on rather than with buttons that quietly do nothing.
Replies
Every open thread has a Reply… box at the bottom. Type and press Reply, or press Enter in the box, which does the same thing. Replies appear indented under the comment they answer, oldest first, each with its own author and date.
Threads are one level deep. A reply attaches to the top comment of its thread, never to another reply, so a long exchange stays a readable column rather than a staircase. Resolved threads have no reply box; reopen the thread if there is more to say.
Resolving and reopening
Press Resolve when a thread is finished. It moves into a collapsed Resolved section at the bottom of the tab, with a count, and its card dims. The button on a resolved thread reads Reopen and puts it back among the open ones.
Whether that Resolved section sits open or closed is remembered as one of your settings, so if you like reading old threads while you revise, open it once and it stays open on your next document.
Resolving leaves the highlight on the page. The passage stays tinted until the thread is deleted, which is the difference between the two actions worth keeping in mind:
| Action | The thread | The highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Resolve | Moves to the Resolved section, replies kept | Stays |
| Reopen | Returns to the open list | Stays |
| Delete | Gone, with every reply on it | Removed from the page |
Delete asks first, and tells you the cost: "Delete this comment and its 3 replies?" when there are replies to lose. If the server refuses the deletion, the status bar says why for about five seconds and the highlight stays where it was, so a refused delete never strips a live comment's passage.
Jumping to the passage
Jump selects the commented passage and scrolls it into view with a brief flash. It works from the other direction too: click any tinted passage in the page and the rail opens on its Comments tab with that card flashed.
Jump has a fallback. It looks for the highlight first, and if that highlight is gone it searches the document for the quoted words. So a comment survives you rewriting the sentence around it, rather than dying with the mark. When the passage has been deleted outright and the words are not findable, Jump does nothing visible and the thread stays where it is, quote intact.
Restoring an earlier version has the same effect and is not a loss. Version restore replaces the text and leaves comment rows alone, so a thread whose passage predates or postdates the version you restored keeps its quote and finds its way back if the text returns. See Chapter 7.
Who may change a comment
Anyone with access to the document can read every thread and reply to any of them. Changing a comment is narrower. Editing the text of a comment, resolving it, reopening it, and deleting it are open to two people: whoever wrote it, and the document's owner. Anyone else gets a refusal reading "Only the comment's author or the document owner can change it".
This is decided on the account, not on the name. Two collaborators called alice at different domains are two people here, and neither can close the other's thread.
A reviewer can comment freely. Suggestions and comments are the two things the server lets a reviewer add to a document they do not own, and everything structural, the words, the formatting, the headings, is refused. Chapter 43 covers what each role can do.
Comments across a whole project
You do not have to open every document to find what is outstanding. The project page's Revise section gathers every open finding and every unresolved comment across all of a project's documents, grouped by document and in binder order, with a count at the top reading something like 4 open findings · 2 unresolved comments · 3 documents.
Each comment there is a link. Following it opens the document, switches the rail to Comments, and jumps to the passage. Only unresolved top-level comments are listed, replies are not, so the roll-up stays a list of things to decide and empties as you work the pile down.
Limits, exports, and what is kept
A comment or reply holds up to 4,000 characters. The quoted passage is stored up to 400 characters, and the card shows about the first 90 of it, which is enough to recognise.
Comments do not travel with your work. The exporters ignore the highlight mark, so a PDF, a Word file or a Final Draft script carries the commented text as ordinary text with nothing attached, and nobody you send a file to sees your notes. Part VIII covers what each export format does and does not carry.
Deleting a document deletes its comments with it. That is the only thing that clears them in bulk.
One privacy note worth stating plainly. Comments are stored by Storskarvia rather than written into your Dropbox or Drive file, and that includes documents with zero retention switched on. Zero retention drops Storskarvia's working copy of the manuscript after every sync, as Chapter 3 describes, and it does not touch your comment threads: the note and the passage it quotes stay in Storskarvia's database until the thread or the document is deleted. If a passage is sensitive enough that zero retention was the reason you turned it on, do not quote it into a comment.
Updated 2026-09-21 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?